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Lexington, Virginia • October 13, 2009

Richard B. Freeman, Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University, will give a lecture in the Johnson Lecture Series at Washington and Lee University on Monday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Millhiser Moot Court Room in the Law School.

Freeman's talk is titled "Can the U.S. Restore Shared Prosperity After the Financial Meltdown?" He will explore the problems facing U.S. workers and business in recovering from the meltdown and suggests ways to overcome those problems.

The lecture will touch on the implosion of Wall Street, the weakness of the U.S. capitalist system, trickle-down economics, the virtues of greed to provide stable growth for all, and the shift in income distribution from the middle class to the super-wealthy.

This lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Johnson Lecture Series, Shepherd Poverty Program and the economics department, is free and open to the public.

As well as holding an esteemed chair in the economics department at Harvard, Freeman currently serves as faculty director of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School. He directs the National Bureau of Economic Research/Sloan Science Engineering Workforce Projects and is Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance.

Freeman also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS) and currently serves as a member of the AAAS Initiative for Science and Technology. He served on the study on Policy Implications of International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the United States. He also served on five panels of the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee on National Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists.

He received the Mincer Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Society of Labor Economics in 2006 and in 2007 was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

His recent publications include What Workers Want (2007, 2nd edition); Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization (2004); Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the 21st Century (2005); America Works: The Exceptional Labor Market (2007); and What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo American World (2007). His forthcoming IZA Prize book is Making Europe Work: IZA Labor Economics Series (2009).